Making clear the line between news and opinion
The Star has launched new initiative to clarify difference for readers
This is news, based in verified fact: the Toronto Star has now taken concrete action to help its readers clearly differentiate between news and opinion on all its publishing platforms.
This is opinion, based on my perspective on that fact: This is an important, worthy and long-needed step in building reader trust in the digital news environment.
Drawing a clear line between news and opinion has long been a core value of the Star. But, as I have stated in the past, the Star has often fallen short of this principle — particularly within its digital environment where too many examples of opinion journalism have been presented with no clear signposts to indicate that what you are reading is not news, but someone’s opinions about the news.
I am happy to now report to you: the Star’s trust initiative gets action. Our trust initiative, launched in May to consider how the Star can foster greater reader trust and media literacy identified the need to differentiate news from opinion as a priority issue.
Those at the most senior levels of this organization readily agreed with this priority. As a result, following considerable work in recent months by a group from the newsroom, digital development and design teams, we now have a clear system in place to ensure our content is labelled correctly, including in the newspaper, the website and on social media. Moreover, this same labelling of articles and within sections will be carried through across all Torstar daily and community news organizations.
The Star has begun adding labels to the newspaper. Online, labels can be found within the article’s URL and above headlines. You can find a “glossary” of the labels we now use to differentiate news from opinion published in the “footer” of the home page of thestar.com.
In brief, news is defined as “verified information based in the impartial reporting of facts,” and opinion as, “articles based on personal interpretation and judgment of facts.”
Within the category of news are “Analysis” — a critical and contextual examination based on factual reporting, but which does not contain the authors’ opinions — and “Investigation” — in-depth reporting in the public interest that reveals wrongdoing and/ or systemic problems and holds power to account.
Opinion is defined as being based in the authors’ interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. Opinion articles include editorials, columns written by staff and commentary from nonstaff contributors.
As I have told many readers during my decade in this office, columnists speak for themselves, not the Star, and have latitude to express opinions contrary to the organization’s institutional views as expressed on the editorial page. That is not to say that columnists, who base their perspectives on the facts as they see them, do not do their own reporting to gather information to inform their views.
Other forms of opinion journalism that take their own labels in the Star include editorials, which present a strong point of view rooted in this news organization’s progressive values; and readers’ letters, reviews, advice, first-person articles and blogs.
In time, we expect to define and add more labels if we determine gaps. We will also likely see a few missteps as we seek consistency in how editors and reporters in our newsrooms apply these labels. This is in some measure a work in progress and we encourage our readers to tell us if these steps go far enough to helping you clearly differentiate news from opinion.
In the current media environment where opinions — often asserted as fact, particularly in the alwayson world of cable news and the cacophony of social media — are everywhere and verified facts in shorter supply, knowing whether journalists and news organizations are reporting facts or expressing opinions has been identified by various global trust initiatives recently as a key indicator of trust.
“News organizations aren’t doing enough to help readers understand the difference between news, analysis and opinion,” Rebecca Iannucci, manager and editor in the Duke Reporters’ Lab wrote in a recent Poynter Institute article about a Reporters’ Lab study that examined the labelling practices of 49 news organizations.
“The findings are significant because journalists and educators are focusing on article labels as one way to address the decline in trust of the news media,” she wrote. “Labels help readers distinguish between news and opinion so they better understand different forms of journalism and can assess allegations of bias.”
This is especially important in the current digital environment because, as Iannucci says, “Readers often come to articles from links in social media and don’t know if an article is published in a news or opinion section unless it is labelled.”
Labelling to provide clear indicators to readers is also a core component of media literacy — important efforts to create deeper public understanding of what journalists do and how we work. As the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University in New York state says on its Digital Resource Center report about the line between news and opinion: “If they are committed to informing news consumers, news outlets are scrupulous about labelling.”
I have no doubt the Star is committed to this principle. Again, we welcome your views on our labelling initiative and maintaining your trust. Send your emails to trust@thestar.ca. publiced@thestar.ca